advocating inflation

I’m advocating 6 percent inflation for at least a couple of years. It would ameliorate the debt bomb and help us work through the deleveraging process…There’s trillions of dollars of debt, in mortgage debt, consumer debt, government debt. It’s a question of how do you achieve the deleveraging. Do you go through a long period of slow growth, high savings and many legal problems or do you accept higher inflation?
—Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard

Anybody who has been a central banker wouldn’t want to see inflation expectations become unhinged. The Fed would have to create a recession to get its credibility back.
—Marvin Goodfriend, former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business

The basic advantage of pushing inflation a little higher is that it would make it less likely that we run into the problem of the interest rate hitting zero and the Fed not being able to stimulate the economy if necessary.
—Laurence Ball, Johns Hopkins

A country that continuously expands its debt as a percentage of GDP and raises much of the money abroad to finance that, it’s going to inflate its way out of the burden of that debt. That becomes a tax on everybody that has fixed- dollar investments.
—Warren Buffet, May 4 CNBC interview